Wednesday, July 10, 2013

The Wall Street Journal's True Colours

As we all know, there’s journalism, and
then there’s journalism.And in turns
out, there’s also economic fundamentalism so fanatic that its proponents would
endorse a regime characterised by extraordinary cruelty and violence because
that regime implemented its economic programme of choice.

Pinochet, of course, was the Chilean
general who with likely CIA backing launched a coup against the democratically
elected president of Chile, Salvador Allende.Allende’s socialism threatened U.S. hegemony in South America, and from
the outset the U.S. was at pains to undermine his government and make an
example of Allende.When the president
found himself in conflict with the judiciary and congress, Pinochet acted.During the 17 years of military dictatorship
which followed, the general was the darling of Margaret Thatcher (who defended
him until his death) and Ronald Reagan.

Pinochet perfected many of the dark arts
used today by terrorist institutions, official and irregular, ranging from Al
Qaeda to the CIA: torture, kidnappings, disappearances, state murders,
etc.Over
3,065 people were killed for
“disappeared”.Nearly 40,000 more were
detained and tortured.Ideological
dissidents (and their families), whether actively opposing the government or
not, were targeted, and with the aid of the CIA and its authoritarian
fellow-travellers in Latin America, Pinochet’s campaign of terror went abroad
through the infamous Operation Condor.

“In Chile”, she wrote, “where friendship
and family are very important, something happened [under Pinochet] that can be
explained by the effect that fear has on the soul of a society.Betrayal and denunciation snuffed out many
lives; all it took was an anonymous voice over the telephone for the badly
named intelligence services to sink their claws into the accused, and, in many
cases, nothing was ever heard of that person again”.

In some ways anticipating the WSJ’s 2013
defence of Pinochet’s regime with reference to Egypt, Allende wrote that “the
figures of economic growth, which won the Wall Street Journal’s praise, did not
represent real development since 10 per cent of the population possessed half
the nation’s wealth, and there were a hundred people who earned more than the
state spent on all social services combined.According to the World Bank, Chile is one of the countries with the
worst distribution of income, right alongside Kenya and Zimbabwe.

“The head of a Chilean corporation earns
the same, or more, than his equivalent in the United States, while a Chilean
labourer earns approximately 15 times less than a North American worker”.

In Chile under Pinochet, while those
economic indicators representing the health of the corporate classes improved,
those representing the welfare of the poor went into decline.By hewing to the economic orthodoxy of the
United States and neoliberal global financial institutions, Pinochet’s regime
was able to obtain economic support that would have been denied to Allende; not
because that orthodoxy “worked”, but because by propping it up in Chile, its
ideological proponents could “prove” its validity, in the same way that they
worked to undermine socialist experiments.

I’m not surprised that the WSJ would
endorse “free market” policies.But I’m
a little surprised that their fanaticism has reached the point that they would
endorse the idea that their grubby little theories which make a virtue of
inequality and exploitation are so important that they are worth thousands of
lives lost and tens of thousands ruined; worth democracy deferred, speech
silenced, and thought put under the gun.

Because if Pinochet is best remembered
for presiding over an authoritarian regime and perfecting the tactics of
terror, free market economics and neoliberalism are at the end of the day
nothing more than their own kind of authoritarianism, making noises about
liberty while trapping people in economic bondage.They ask people to commit themselves to
structured inequality, holding out the promise that, of their own volition, those
at the top will eventually concede some of their spectacular wealth (if not
their command of the economy) to those languishing at the bottom.

And the “free market” itself becomes a
fetish, something beyond criticism, and end in itself irrespective of how its
harsh implementation affects those who see their salaries and quality of life
decline, who lose their jobs, lose their homes, lose their ability to bargain with
employers, and ultimately lose their democracy.

It is a government of terror, which
practised the economics of exploitation and disenfranchisement—nothing more and
nothing less—which is being defended by the Wall
Street Journal.Egyptians should be
so lucky, the crackpot editorial board believes, from its bunker, to be blessed
to suffer under such a regime.

About Me

I am from Northern California, and am the fifth generation of my family to have lived in the Golden State. Now I live next-door in the Silver State, where I research and write about colonialism and decolonization in Africa, teach European, African, environmental, and colonial history, and write this blog, mostly about politics, sometimes about history, and occasionally about travels or research.